Broken Pixels (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 4) (15 page)

Mara and Ping slowly approached the spill-over crowd standing on the sidewalk in front of the wide-open alcove that featured an elaborate arrangement of rust-colored slate slabs of stone. It was actually a fountain. However, at the moment, no water ran or pooled around the stones. The surrounding foliage and lights gave the makeshift stage an amphitheater feel. Dozens of people jostled forward, while holding their tiny purple crystals aloft, pumping their arms to the increasingly rapid chant, “See the light. Shine the light.” They ignored Mara and Ping as they pressed into the small area.

Ping placed his hand on Mara’s shoulder and practically had to yell over the din, “Let’s not get separated.”

Mara nodded and tiptoed to get a better view. On the stage comprised of vertical blocks of copper-colored stone, two large men stood in what appeared to be green mechanic’s uniforms. Their names—though indiscernible from this distance—were written in script on red and white oval patches over their left breast pockets. Each man, holding blazing wooden torches, flanked a woman in her early thirties.
Odd. Torches in a well-lit city park
. The woman stood grinning manically at the gathering, wagging her own crystal at them. Her face reddening, veins popping out along her temples, she screamed the chant back at the audience, slightly out of sync and much too shrilly.
She’s off-key and looks unhinged, about to have some kind of nervous breakdown
.

The men raised their torches to the sky, and the crowd went silent. Mara glanced over to Ping and raised an eyebrow. He shook his head and shrugged.

The man on the right in a deep baritone bellowed, “See the light,” and the crowd raised their crystals. The man on the left raised his torch and said, “Shine the light,” and the crowd stretched their arms higher and answered, “Be the light!”

A sudden pain shot through Mara’s head. She winced and brought her left hand to her temple, attempting to rub away the pain.

Noticing, Ping leaned into her and said, “What’s wrong?”

The crowd chanted, “Be the light. Be the light,” slowly at first, but the tempo and volume increased with each repetition.

Mara wavered on her feet and said, “I don’t know. Something is happening. I think I’m getting some kind of feedback from the Sig-net, and it feels like it’s digging a hole in my brain. Something bad is about to happen.”

Ping looked up to the center of attention ahead. The men standing on the large stones lowered their torches to the pants legs of the woman between them. Ping gasped. Mara noticed the horror on his face and straightened, following his gaze toward the front of the crowd.

Flames had caught and crawled up the legs of the woman as her screams of “Be the light” pierced the lower-register chants of the crowd. “Be the light. Be the light!”

“Oh, my God! What are they doing?” Mara asked no one in particular. She raised a hand toward the woman, as if offering assistance, and everything stopped. The crowd froze in mid-chant, their little crystals—still held aloft and shining—were stilled mid-twinkle. The fire crawling up the woman’s legs, licked at her hips but did not consume them.

A look of concern etched on his face, Ping asked, “Are you still in pain? How did you know they were about to do that?”

Mara shook her head and said, “I’m not sure I knew what they were about to do. I just had this stabbing pain, and I think the suggestion came from the Sig-net.”

Her looked ahead and said, “Perhaps you are somehow picking up on the woman’s agony. After all, she’s still connected to the Sig-net, correct?”

“I have no idea, but we have to get up there and help her before Time starts moving again. I don’t think it’ll hold very long. I already feel kind of worn out,” Mara said.

She stepped forward, wedging herself between a knot of people just in front of her. Ping followed but, not being as slim, had a tougher time squeezing through. He fell behind, and Mara reached the stones on which the two men and the woman stood a few moments ahead of him. When he caught up to her, Mara had paused in front of the five-foot-tall stone pillar, looking at the woman through the fire that consumed her. The woman clawed at the air, her face frozen in a twisted expression of pain or ecstasy or both. Mara wasn’t sure.

“What should we do?” Ping asked.

Mara pointed behind the pillars and said, “I think I see some steps back there. We need to get up there and help her.”

She disappeared into the shadows behind the tall rocks. Following, Ping asked, “To what end? What will we do once we get up there?”

In the darkness, Mara said, “The steps lead up to a wall, but it’s too far back from the stones they are standing on.”

A loud clatter in the darkness behind her caused her to turn.

“I think I found how they got up there. It’s a ladder,” Ping said.

With her eyes adjusting to the dimmer light, Mara could just make out the silver rungs leading up the back of the pillars. She grabbed a rung and began her ascent. Ping held the side of the ladder for a moment and decided it was steady enough for him to follow.

“We’re getting a little more involved here than we anticipated,” Ping said, as he climbed. “Sam will become impatient if we don’t return to the corner soon.”

Mara cleared the top of the ladder and stood on the stones behind the woman. She waited for Ping to catch up and reached down to assist him. Just as she clasped his hand, an excruciating bolt of pain shot through her chest, and she staggered, bumping into the back of the burning woman. Mara stumbled to her knees, her elbow grazing one of the flames wrapping around the woman’s legs. The burning sensation caused her to jerk forward and fall on her side.

Ping cleared the ladder and ran to her.

“My chest,” Mara said, writhing on the ground. “I feel like someone just stabbed me with a machete.” Then she flickered.

Ping’s eyes widened and said, “You don’t know what is causing this?”

Between gritted teeth, Mara said, “No.”

“Well then, we should leave immediately. You are in no condition to help here,” he said.

“No. We can’t leave her like this. You have to help her.”

Ping could see the rough surface of the stone through Mara’s body as she faded in and out of sight. He looked up and saw the flames of the torches the men held fluttered slowly like tiny red and yellow pennants in the wind. “What is it you want me to do? We don’t have much time before the crowd will be moving again!”

“Take her pants off!” Mara said.

“What?”

“Slip off her pants while everyone is still frozen. Be careful of the flames, they may not be moving, but they will still burn,” Mara said. Another spasm of pain shot through her chest. “Hurry!”

Ping jumped up and ran to the woman. He bent around her left side and then the right, assessing the situation. Fire had consumed the woman’s jeans up to her knees and was licking around her thighs, a couple flames reaching as high as her hips. Before dealing with her pants, he decided to do something about the source of the fire. Reaching over to the arm of the large man on the right, Ping attempted to push it away by bending it at the elbow. It wouldn’t budge. Pushing the man’s shoulder to get his entire body to move didn’t work either.

“Hurry!” Mara yelled from behind him.

Ping grabbed the wooden shaft of the torch itself and wrenched it from the man’s hand. Oddly his fingers remained curled in the air, and, when Ping held up the torch, the flame was missing. He glanced toward the side of the woman, and there, floating in the air was the ball of flame. Using the torch, he batted at the flames, which disintegrated into a shower of yellow and red cubes, shiny translucent pixels that slowly faded into nothingness as they fell away.

Running to the other side of the woman, Ping grabbed the other torch and wacked at the flames remaining in the air. With that accomplished, he looked at the woman and batted at the flames along her legs, hoping he could extinguish them without having to remove her pants.

“Ping, I’m losing my grip on Time here!” Mara groaned through her teeth.

He threw the second torch into the night and reached around the woman’s waist, unbuttoned her pants and pulled on her zipper.

“Oh, please be wearing underwear,” he said.

He yanked her pants to the ground, pulled back on her nearest calf and slipped the left pant leg free of her foot and then did the same for the right. He picked up the pants by a belt loop and threw them into the dark behind the stone pillar on which they stood. He turned to check on Mara just as she disappeared.

Behind him, from the crowd below, someone yelled, “Ping! What the hell are you doing up there?” It was Sam.

As Ping spun around, from the corner of his eye, he saw Mara reappear. She clasped her head and had a look of agony on her face. “Run!” she said, then flickered away again.

Ping stepped toward her, but a large beefy arm came from behind him and wrapped itself around his neck. Suddenly, as if someone had disengaged the Mute button on a television set, he heard the loud rapid chant, “Be the light. Be the light!” He exploded into a cloud of dust that swirled around the top of the stone pillars.

* * *

Below, Sam stood in the middle of the gathering, holding Cam’s head tucked into one side of his jacket, when the crowd reanimated. He was having trouble understanding what was happening. When the crowd had gone quiet, and Mara and Ping did not return immediately, Sam became worried and decided to find out what was happening. When he encountered the frozen crowd, he understood—that was Mara’s doing.
But why was Ping up on that rock taking off that woman’s pants?
No wonder that guy jumped him up there.

The crowd, still chanting “Be the light,” surged forward, pushing Sam along, as if he were trapped in a river current. Several yards from the tall rocks where Ping and the others had been standing, he saw Mara appear and pull herself to her knees. She looked a little hazy.
She overdid it again. She’s flickering
.

The people behind him shoved him forward, and Sam pushed back at them. Turning, he found himself facing what looked like a leather-clad motorcycle gang. Without batting an eye, he said, “Cut it out. Stop!” Three of the men closest to him—two of them bearded and burly, the third a baby-faced bean pole—immediately stopped short. Sam’s eyes widened with realization.
So I can prompt these robot people
.

After a moment’s consideration, he pointed over his shoulder and said, “There’s girl on top of that rock who looks like she’s sick. Go get her and bring her down. Don’t let anyone hurt her.” As he watched the men push past him through the crowd, he called after them, “Oh, if you see a Chinese guy hanging around up there, bring him too.” Sam had seen Ping explode into a cloud of dust and saw it swirl around for a few minutes, but Sam wasn’t sure if the baker had reconstituted himself on top of the rock or somewhere here on the ground.

The crowd closed around Sam before he could follow the men. He saw the bikers disappear around the stone pillars, but the chanting morphed into an angry clamor and then a synchronous gasp of fear, prompting him to look up. The now-pantless woman staggered to the edge of the stone and teetered there, maintaining her footing by waving her arms. Beside her, a large man reached out but missed, just as she plunged off the rock and onto the people below. A small hole formed at the front of the gathering as people toppled over, breaking the woman’s fall. Sam felt the crowd push back around him. The shifting waves of bodies cleared a path ahead to the pillars, and Sam bolted forward, stopping when he was just a few feet away from the tall stones.

Now behind him, the fallen woman crawled from a knot of people and stood, jabbing her finger into the air and screaming, “She did it! She stopped me from being the light!”

The crowd angrily shouted and raised their fists into the air. “Be the light. Be the light!”

Sam followed their gaze to the top of the stones. Above, two large men held Mara between them. She looked pale and dazed. Jumping up and down, waving his free arm, Sam yelled, “Hey, sis! Help is on the way!” Though she was only a few yards away, the bedlam drowned him out.

Sam looked into his jacket at Cam and asked, “Can you get a message to Mara through that Internet of yours?”

“Sig-net. I think so. I was able to communicate with her earlier. Remember?”

“Yeah. Tell her to go with the men in the leather jackets. She won’t know who they are if you don’t get through.”

Cam’s eyes half closed, and he said, “I’m sending it now.”

Sam looked up at his sister. She straightened a bit, becoming more alert. Her head turned slowly, as if she were scanning the crowd. It stopped when her gaze locked onto Sam.

“I think she got the message,” Cam said. “She’s seems upset that we didn’t stay at the corner like she wanted.”

“Too bad,” Sam said.

The crowd, now more riotous and angry, surged forward like a tide coming in. The chants had lost their cadence and devolved into catcalled threats, seemingly aimed at the top of the vertical stones, at Mara. The people were pumping their fists, not holding up little lights. Sam stepped toward the group as they closed in. Sweeping his arm in front of him, he yelled at the crowd, “Hey, look at me! Look at me!”

He caught the attention of a few people right in front of him but not nearly enough people to matter. He needed something to grab their attention. For a second he looked around for something large to wave, like a stick. While doing that, he lost his grip on Cam’s head and nearly dropped it. Then he got an idea.

He opened his jacket and said, “I’m really sorry about this, man.”

“Wha—” Cam tried to say as Sam threw open his jacket.

Grabbing a handful of Cam’s hair, Sam held the head out in front of him and yelled, “One more step and I’ll take off your head too!”

A loud gasp went up as the crowd stopped and leaned back from the ghastly sight.

“Now look at me! Look at me!” Sam called to them, making sure every pair of eyes was on him. After scanning the crowd a couple times, he prompted, “I want all of you to stand there and not move until I tell you to.”